Here at "A Dash" it seem like amateur hour in analyzing the stress tests and the various leaks. People who have little experience with government and policy making are rushing to judgment about the process. Let us consider a prominent example.  David Wiedner at the WSJ writes as follows: On the eve of the official announcement, the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are leaking stress-test results like pipes in a 100-year-old house. Out of the tens of thousands of readers of his column, we are probably the only ones who clicked through to all of the sources and tried to determine what the journalists said.  None of them are citing a "high government official" or a "well-placed government source."  Quite the opposite, and no support for the allegation. We had a similar experience today on RealMoney, TheStreet.com's site ...

div align=”justify”Policy makers are trying to cut through the Gordian Knot that is this banking crisis with rusty nailclippers rather than wielding a very sharp sword. The financial collapse that has engulfed the world economy can seem overwhemingly complex, but in essence it boils down to two interacting financial theories that were tested to destruction.emstrong The first was that securitization, the slicing and dicing of individual asset risk at any given bank to be parcelled up and sold on/strong/em, would lead to a more stable financial system by limiting the balance sheet concentration and hence vulnerability to external shocks of each institution. Risk was to be scattered to the four winds. strongemThat neat idea ignored the systemic risks that ensued if most institutions lent recklessly/em/strong on the assumption that their individual credit downside had been ‘outsourced’ to a seemingly bottomless pool of anonymous global investors. emstrongThe second was that emerging …